Untitled Sermon (3)

Paul's Letter to the Romans. Chapter 13, verses 11 to 14. Besides this, you know the time that the hour than when we first first believed the night is far gone, the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light, let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual imity and sensuality, not in and jealous, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires. This is the Word of the Lord.

I have taught for several decades in a religious environment where it is common to hear students talk about when they had been saved or estimate how long it had been since they had been saved. Among evangelical Christians, being saved often has a very specific meaning, it speaks of the reality Jesus and him as Lordship, with him putting one's trust in him and being invited into a living relationship with him.

Paul speaks of these realities when he writes to Christians in Ephesus. As to people already in some sense saved by grace, you have been saved through faith. But if we are accustomed to think about salvation only in terms of some date in the past, paul's words in Romans 3, 11 should give us pause. Paul speaks here about salvation getting closer to us, the further away we get from the hour we first believed salvation is still in some sense ahead, an event which we are still moving and not behind us. This is not the only passage in Paul that speaks in these terms. Earlier in Romans. Paul had given his hearers assurance of their salvation, but notably a salvation that was yet to occur in their future. He writes. God shows his love for us that while we were still sinners. Christ died for us, since therefore we have now been justified by his blood. Much more shall we be saved by Him from the wrath of God. For if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son.

Re by his life Paul wants his readers to have confidence concerning Jesus deliverance of them in the future, but he still points them to the future for their salvation.

And before Paul can that the word about the is to those who are being saved the power of God as opposed to those who are perishing, to whom it is foolishness. The two groups. Those who are being saved and those who are perishing are described using present participles in the Greek, the present tens of the participle indicating here individuals in the thick of a process or of an action in progress. People find themselves in one of two processes during their lifetime, depending on their response to the Gospel, but just as those who reject the message about the deliverance God has made possible through Christ are on their way out, so those who have responded openly and gratefully are still in the process of experiencing that deliverance, just as those who are on the process of perishing have not yet perished, so those who are in the process of being saved have not yet arrived in their eternal harbor.

In paul's view, salvation and being saved constitute a much larger divine drama into which we are swept up. It begins with Jesus acts on our behalf long before our birth and in our joining ourselves to this Jesus by our trust in and commitment to Him. It ends with Jesus acts on our behalf at the consummation of all things on the last day, the day of the Lord that is already dawning just below the horizon. Salvation is a trajectory, and as such Paul calls us in this passage to live in a manner reflective of thatjectory. Paul is not embarrassed, as are many Protestant Christians, especially, to talk about the necessity of making an ethical response appropriate to where believers find themselves in god's timeline. Here with the day, the day of the dawning of god's kingdom approaching closer and closer, if we look forward to salvation on the Day of Judgment or the day of Christs, then the light that day must illumina our steps today, tomorrow and all our days.

Paul plays on the images of night and day, darkness and light. Looking ahead to the day of salvation, we must put away everything that belongs to the night, the darkness that the light of god's dawning kingdom is driving away. Since we know that this day is coming, we have this god-given opportunity to put away from ourselves all the attitudes, all the behaviors, all the secret sins that would bring us shame were they to see the light of day, especially the light that day. People looking forward never end. This opportunity. Paul would affirm, is a gift not to be neglected. He reminds us also in brief, of the god-given resource that makes this transformation possible, we have put on Christ in baptism. We can put on Christ more and more fully each day in the language of Galatians. Christ, by the power of the Spirit, can come alive and live through us or come to be fully formed in us. As this happens, we become what will be who fulfil the righteous demand of god's law. As Paul has just discussed in the paragraph prior to this one.

This passage had a profound impact on a young man named Augustine when he was still wavering between living to satisfy his own ambitions and desires and living to serve god's purposes. He was sitting in a garden one afternoon and overheard some children on the other side of a wall playing a game and chanting and keeping with the nature of the game at 1 point, pick it up and read it. Pick it up and read it. August heard this the copy of the Scriptures he had beside him, and opened it up to this very passage. Decades later, as he wrote his confessions. Augustine looked upon that moment as decisive in his life. He took it as a word from God directly to him and wavered no longer between wanting the best of this world and devoting himself fully to the God who would allow him entry into the next world. May God grant this paragraph to affect each one of us similarly, so that we live as those who long for nothing more than the salvation Christ will give us on that day.